New Twist in Cultural Saga

By WILLIAM H. HONAN

Published: May 27, 1996

What started as a cultural tug-of-war over a small statue of a Japanese folk hero at Rollins College in Winter Park, Fla., has led to the signing at this year's commencement of what amounts to a peace treaty between the college and the statue's new owners in Okinawa.

In 1994, Shizuo Kishaba, a specialist in the recovery of cultural property lost from the Japanese island of Okinawa during World War II, discovered the three-foot, 200-pound bronze statue of a revered 19th-century Japanese moral philosopher at Rollins.

The statue, which depicts Kinjiro Ninomiya, a sort of Japanese Horatio Alger, who preached the virtues of hard work and self-reliance, had been taken from Okinawa by victorious American marines at the war's end. In 1946, it was given to the college by an alumnus as a trophy.

Politely, Mr. Kishaba, who is president of the Ryukyu-America Historical Research Society in Okinawa, asked Rollins to return the statue. Politely, the college trustees said no. Then Mr. Kishaba suggested that if the bronze statue were returned to Okinawa his countrymen would present Rollins with a reproduction. The trustees said yes. The statue went back to Okinawa last year.

Yesterday, a delegation of Okinawan Japanese led by Mr. Kishaba signed "an agreement of cooperation." The agreement pledges to develop additional cooperative projects between Rollins and Shogaku Junior and Senior High School, the Okinawan school where the original statue has been placed.

At the college's commencement ceremony, in front of 285 graduates and some 3,000 guests, Masajiro Nashiro, president of the Okinawan school, received the Hamilton Holt Medal, named in honor of a former Rollins president and prominent internationalist who advised both the philanthropist Andrew Carnegie and President Woodrow Wilson. It was Mr. Holt who accepted the statue in 1946.

Photo: This smallbronze statue binds Rollins College in Florida to Okinawa. (Joe Skipper for The New York Times)